Learning By Doing

Melissa couldn't help but be nervous about him, even though he'd responded to her ad. The ad itself was the reason.

She waited in the fast-food restaurant with as much poise and patience as she could muster. The girls cooperated for once. Though there were many other noisy, boisterous children there to set them off, they concentrated on their crayons and coloring books with a singular intensity.

The door creaked. She looked up and saw a middle-aged man of medium height enter the restaurant alone. He looked about swiftly, saw her bright red blouse and black canvas handbag, and made directly for her.

In the few seconds she had in which to study him and decide whether to dissimulate, she went from nervousness to an acute curiosity.

He wasn't screen-idol material, but he was good-looking enough: athletically trim, with a pleasant, open face that obviously didn't get much sun, topped by a thick mop of brown hair. He wore casual clothes, as she did, but they were of good quality and perfectly clean. His expression was noncommittal, neither censorious nor eager.

I wonder what he's thinking about me.

He stopped at her table. Alia and Renee looked up, their eyes widening and mouths making Os of surprise and interest.

"Melissa Harland?"

She nodded and rose. "My friends call me Mel." She extended a hand, and he took it.

"I'm Ron Beaufort." He started to seat himself and paused. "May I be introduced to these young ladies?"

She bit her lip. "Of course." She gestured right -- This is Alia" and then left -- "and this is Renee. Girls, say hello to Mr. Beaufort."

Alia put down her crayon and stood in her chair. Her hand was slow to rise, but Beaufort took it and shook it with a grave delicacy. Renee got up and came around the table, and he shook her hand as well.

"They're charmers," he said as all of them sat. "You must be proud of them."

She nodded. "I told them to be on best behavior."

Alia chose that moment to screech, "Are you going to be our new daddy?" at a pitch that could have shattered the pyramids and roused the pharaohs from beneath them. Heads throughout the restaurant turned to look. Melissa resisted the urge to hide under the table, but just barely.

"Alia, sit and be quiet," he said. The six-year-old reddened at the steel in the words. She was about to go back to her coloring, but Beaufort looked her in the eye and silently compelled her attention.

"I might be, Alia. It will depend on a lot of things. One of them is how you behave while we're here." As Alia's lips twisted into a toddler's petulant pout, he smiled and continued. "If you're really good, I might decide that you don't need a new daddy. Or if you're really bad, I might decide that you just have to have one."

Melissa's mouth dropped open. He flashed her a wink.

"Now," he said, "would anyone like something to eat?"

Three-quarters of an hour spent in casual small talk over hamburgers and milkshakes left her wondering why he'd answered her ad. He was forty years old and had never married. He was an engineer at Onteora Aviation, had an upper-middle-class income, and lived in a house outside of town that he'd owned for thirteen years. His appearance was more than satisfactory, his voice was smooth and pleasant, and his grooming was first-rate. He had no tics or twitches. He was comfortable with any topic of conversation or none. He had better manners than anyone she'd ever known.

He was too much the dream-come-true, too free of disabling flaws of personality or noxious traits of character. He didn't sport any danger signs at all.

"Hey," she said without thinking, "when you leave here, who are you going to report to?"

He frowned. "Excuse me?"

"Come on," she said. "You're too good to be real. No one with your assets needs to meet a single mother in a hamburger joint. Somebody put you up to this."

He stared at her from under a furrowed brow for the most uncomfortable seven seconds of her life.

"Melissa," he said, "I answered your ad because I wanted to meet you."

The simple dignity of it froze her tongue. It took an agonizing amount of effort even to whisper, "Why?"

He leaned forward and pitched his voice very low. "'Single white mother, twenty-eight, very poor, seeks a decent gentleman to provide a safe, clean home for me and my two daughters. Neither age nor appearance matters. I will accommodate you.'"

It was the ad she'd filed.

"In part," he said, voice still near to inaudible, "I wanted to meet the woman who could humble herself far enough to say such a thing. I wanted to hear her story. And in part, I was curious about the 'accommodation' part. That's hardly a standard romantic gambit. It doesn't leave a lot of room to haggle. I wanted to know what twist of fate made you willing to 'accommodate' anyone who'd be willing to put a roof over you and your daughters."

The silence stretched. Alia and Renee looked up at her with a hint of alarm.

"We're alone in the world, Ron." She spoke as quietly as he had. "My husband abandoned me four months ago. He's disappeared from the face of the Earth. I have no living relations except for the girls. We've been living in an S.R.O. two blocks from here. I'm just about out of money and I can't work. I can't even drive. If I don't get a huge break of some sort really soon, I'll have to do...well, something pretty dramatic."

He looked down at his folded hands. "Why can't you work or drive?"

Instead of answering, she pulled her little bottle of Dilantin out of her handbag and slid it across to him. He picked it up, read the label, and nodded.

"I understand. Well, will I do?"

Her heart vaulted into her mouth. "Why...why are you doing this?"

He smiled wanly. "You seem perfectly nice. Your girls don't deserve to suffer. And I've wanted a family for a long time."

She started to ask why haven't you got one? and held it back by the narrowest of margins.

"All right," she whispered. "When?"

He pursed his lips and held still for a long moment. She began to be afraid.

"There are some conditions. First, I want it perfectly understood that it's my house. I set the rules. You can come and go as you please, but if you have any filthy habits, or a friend or acquaintance I can't stand, I'll tell you so, and I'll expect you to behave accordingly. Second, the girls seem well behaved, but if I have a criticism or a correction of them to make in the future, I'll expect you to back me up no matter what it is. Third, I have a cleaning woman who comes in once a week, but she won't deal with clutter, only dust and dirt. If you leave a lot of clutter around, you'll get to keep your dust and dirt too. So you're all expected to keep your rooms neat. "

Your rooms?

"Fourth, there's a room in the basement that's mine alone. No one is to go in there but me, whether the door is open or closed. If I'm in there and you need me, knock and I'll answer you. Except for that room, you'll have the run of the house. Agreed?"

She nodded.

"Do Alia and Renee agree, too?"

She took their hands in hers. "They will."

He rose. "Let's go get your stuff."

Ron's house wasn't a mansion, just a four-bedroom Dutch colonial on the outskirts of the city. But it was spacious and clean, sparsely furnished but still homey and inviting. The pine-paneled living room featured a large leather sofa, a large-screen TV, and a small fireplace. The kitchen was airy and bright, with immaculately clean fixtures and all the usual conveniences. The oak-plank floors were dust-free.

He took the girls to two smallish bedrooms and told them to settle in, then led Melissa to a third one. She peeked through the door and felt confusion rise inside her.

It was a nice room, but it wasn't the master bedroom. It was perhaps ten feet by twelve, with a single window that overlooked his well-kept lawn. There was a large dresser with a cherry veneer, a large closet with mirrored sliding doors, a modest writing desk in some darkly stained wood, a pair of standing lamps, and a simply made bed. A single bed, meant for one person.

He slid her valise through the door and said, "Yours. Let me know if there's anything you need."

She looked up at him. "But, aren't we...?"

"No."

"Why?" She wasn't Miss America, but she'd kept her weight down and her skin clear. Even over the four months past, she'd never neglected her grooming.

His face tightened in discomfort. "It's not an issue, Mel. Just settle in, make yourself comfy, and let's get on with making a family and raising the kids, okay?"

Did he take me in to get access to the girls?

"Ron..."

He saw her fear and raised a hand as if to ward away a threat. "You don't have to worry about that. All I ask of you and the girls is your company. Are we going to have problems because I don't want anything else from you?"

Nothing in his words rang false, but she was suffused with a formless dread that she couldn't dispel. If he didn't want her body, and he didn't want to abuse her daughters, why on Earth was he opening his home to them? What was his angle?

"Is it my epilepsy? I swear it doesn't affect --"

"Enough!"

She fell silent.

"Please," he said, and all at once his fear, as vast as it was inexplicable, became visible to her. "Just make yourself at home. Dinner's at six. I'll cook."

It didn't take long for Melissa to decide that if Ron wasn't the ideal spouse and stepfather for her daughters, for damned sure he could have the post until the real thing came along.

He kept metronome-perfect hours: up at five-thirty each morning, off to work by six-thirty, and back at five every afternoon. He retired no later than ten on any evening. He made little noise in coming or going; she had to set her own alarm clock so that she could breakfast with him. Dinner was between six and seven every evening: earlier if she cooked, later if he did. He never missed a family meal and insisted that no one else do so either.

His table-talk was as light and pleasant as the day they'd met, whether it was about world affairs, the girls' schoolwork, or doings in the neighborhood. Alia and Renee chattered with him freely. He seemed to delight in it. Often Mel would repress her own small talk just to enjoy the banter her daughters exchanged with their benefactor. When the girls had cleared their places and had left the two adults alone, he invariably steered conversation to topics of interest to her. On some evenings, they watched television together. On others, they read in company or played board games with the girls.

On weekends, he busied himself with minor home maintenance and improvements, tended to his yard, or read and listened to music. He was endlessly amenable to Mel's ideas for impromptu family outings, though he seldom produced initiatives of his own. He made few phone calls and took practically none.

She asked him only for money enough to fill the larder. He always gave her what she asked, and never questioned its use. After a few weeks, he asked if she would like an allowance with which she could do as she wished. She admitted that it would be nice. Every Friday thereafter, he handed her three hundred dollars in twenties, and never thereafter inquired what she'd done with it.

Perhaps once a week, he would go down to his room in the basement. He didn't announce it; he simply went. He would spend about half an hour there. Afterward, he would pour himself a glass of wine and sit quietly for a long while.

After they'd been together about three months, Mel asked him if he thought they should have a dog. It wasn't something she'd always wanted; it just seemed right for the house and the situation. He agreed at once, and a week later the largest, shaggiest black dog in all of creation joined their household. The girls shrank back and would have hidden behind Mel, but she guided them forward to meet the unlikely beast, who promptly tongue-lashed both their faces to a giggling glow.

"His name is Bjorn," Ron said. "He's a rescue dog."

"Hm?" Mel couldn't believe how much of him there was. Bjorn was the size of a small bear. He had more hair on him than any dog she'd ever seen, and beneath that was at least a hundred fifty pounds of actual flesh and bone. As she rubbed his head and ears, Alia went to the nether end and hugged his tail, while Renee slid beneath him and tickled his belly. The dog seemed to love it all.

"The family that got him as a puppy had to give him up. They had no idea how big he'd get. We were lucky. He's a Newf. Best dog breed there ever was."

Twin stalactites of drool had formed at the corners of Bjorn's mouth. Without warning he shook his head vigorously, and the living room walls acquired new decorations. Everyone laughed. Ron ran for a dishtowel.

"Got to wipe that stuff up fast," he said. "It dries hard."

As he was swabbing a streak of drool from the paneling, she gave way to impulse and wrapped her arms around him from behind. It was the first time they'd touched since their introductory handshake.

He straightened in surprise as she laid her cheek against his back. He did not turn.

"Mel?"

"Thank you, God," she whispered. "Thank you from the bottom of my heart for Ronald Beaufort!"

"Mel..." His voice was thick.

"Hm?"

"We'd better get Bjorn used to the back yard, don't you think?"

"Oh." She released him and stood a little back. "Yeah."

Though Mel was quickly rid of the suspicion that Ron was some sort of molester or abuser, she never freed herself of her deeper fear: that he had no real reason to keep her around, and would someday decide to turn her out just as arbitrarily as he'd taken her in.

With no sexual bond between them, and no obvious reason for him to value her daughters as she did, it was a possibility she could not exclude. She did her best not to think about it, but at odd moments of leisure, when the girls were in school and there was nothing to occupy her around the house, it would creep under her defenses and lash her with doubt. It made her cast about for ways to ingratiate herself to him. The more she did of that, the emptier and weaker seemed his reasons for his generosity. For generosity it was, and nothing else. She did not clean or entertain for him. He cooked at least as well as she, and was plainly competent enough in the other domestic skills he couldn't hire to do just fine on his own. She and her children brought nothing to his life except the pleasure of their company.

He seemed to enjoy her company, and the company of her daughters, more than she did. The girls adored him in their turn, and ran to him with shrieks of delight every evening when he returned from work. It wasn't a subject she could discuss with him; her ponderings were her own.

The fear grew from a minor puzzlement to something dark and impervious. What test might they face that would rend that gossamer pleasure? When and where would it come? Would she recognize it approaching in time to head it off?

She could not know, and she could not ask him. Every night, when they retired to their separate bedrooms, she asked herself, when the fatal moment came as it inevitably must, how she could possibly endure it.

"You know," she said as she cleared the table, "you never talk shop."

"Hm?" He looked up from the sink with one eyebrow cocked. The sun spilling through the kitchen window glittered on his thick brown hair.

"Don't you like to talk shop? I thought all engineers did."

He chuckled. "True enough, but I didn't think you'd be interested."

She slid the breakfast plates into the dishwasher and latched it shut. "Try me out. What do you do all day?"

He rinsed and dried his hands and threaded the dishtowel onto its rack. "I train radars."

"Huh?"

"I train radars to recognize all sorts of approaching objects. Radars for use at commercial airports."

"They're run by computers, aren't they?" From the back landing came the sound of Bjorn nosing the screen door, demanding to be let in.

"Yup, but you still have to teach them what they need to know." He went to the back door and admitted Bjorn, who promptly shook a mass of leaves and pine needles onto the kitchen floor. He laughed and went for the broom and dustpan. "Are you really interested?"

"Well, yeah."

He swept up the debris and tossed it into the garbage. "Then throw some real clothes on and I'll show you."

"On a Saturday?"

He shrugged. "Why not?"

"Okay." She went to her room, exchanged her sweats and slippers for a blouse, jeans, and sneakers, and met him in the garage.

His lab looked like something assembled from a junkyard, but he assured her that every scrap of it had a purpose.

"This," he said, pointing to a weblike array of plates, struts, and wires, "is a phased-array antenna for a next-generation sweep radar. It's got really good eyes. Maybe too good. It sees a lot of things it could never recognize by fixed rules, so the computer that drives it" -- he waved at a beige box in a far corner -- "has to learn how to tell stuff it can safely ignore from real concerns."

She peered at the thing without comprehension. "How does it do that?"

He grinned. "I teach it." He waved at a wall hung with dozens of metal contraptions. "By using those jigs, I can create many thousands of different radar reflections. Basically, I can simulate anything ever found in the sky. If the computer's rule base produces a correct evaluation of the kind of reflection I'm testing, I try another one. If it doesn't, I look for the holes in the rule base and make adjustments until it does."

"Is it programming, then?"

"Some programming, some physics, a few other things too." He gained animation with each word. "It has to learn how to learn, Mel. There's no way we can prepare the radar for everything it might see in the sky. So we have to make it versatile. We have to give it the capacity to acquire new knowledge as it goes." He grinned. "Think of it as on-the-job training."

"How'd you get into this?" It didn't seem like the sort of thing you could study in school.

He flipped a hand. "A few years ago, the guy who used to do it got hit by a car. I took a stab at it, found out I was pretty good at it."

She listened with interest, not to a presentation on the physics of electromagnetic detection or the heuristics of the associated interpretation logic, but to a narration of how his career had moved from a conventional track in electronic design to another he could never have anticipated. After a few minutes, he ran down and smiled sheepishly.

"I'm sorry. I talk too much, I know."

"No!" she said. "It's great. It's fascinating. We've been together more than half a year and I didn't know the first --" She realized where she was headed and fell silent in embarrassment.

He looked at her with a hint of dawning realization in his eyes. Presently he took her hand between his two and chafed it tenderly.

"Mel, you know all the important stuff about me. You've known it since the day we met. What I do here is fun some of the time, but really it's just earning a living. What I do at home, with you and the kids -- that's life."

Her eyes flooded, and she nodded. They left his lab in silence, her hand in his.

On the way back to the house, she laid a hand on his arm and said, "We should pick up some bread and milk. We're almost out."

He nodded and pulled into a convenience store. As they stepped out of the car, she moved up to him and tucked her hand under his arm. He noticed, but said nothing. They made their selections and got on the checkout line behind a modest queue of other shoppers.

They were next to check out when a too-familiar voice said, "Melissa?"